A sliding window technique for interactive high-performance computing scenarios

Interactive high-performance computing is doubtlessly beneficial for many computational science and engineering applications whenever simulation results should be visually processed in real time, i.e. during the computation process. Nevertheless, interactive HPC entails a lot of new challenges that have to be solved – one of them addressing the fast and efficient data transfer between a simulation back end and visualisation front end, as several gigabytes of data per second are nothing unusual for a simulation running on some (hundred) thousand cores. Here, a new approach based on a sliding window technique is introduced that copes with any bandwidth limitations and allows users to study both large and small scale effects of the simulation results in an interactive fashion.